The blog Himalayan blunder by J. Srinivasan, drove me to think of various other Himalayan blunders that have been committed by man. I am listing below the major ones.

The first one that comes to my mind in this regard is class discrimination. The recent incident of an upper caste Hindu asking a Dalit boy to carry foortwear over his head whenever he passed through the upper-class dominant street is a pointer to this fact. Is it not man’s Himalayan blunder to have invented the caste system?

The second one in the list is discrimination against fairer sex. Women have been subjected to various kinds of inhuman treatment — from property inheritance to job reservation. I think the root cause of discrimination against women emanates from the Himalayan blunder of not allowing them to earn for their living. They were always kept as dependents. Had they been allowed to work and earn as is prevalent now, the world would have prospered in a balanced and harmonious way without dowry deaths, sati, etc. Is it not?

The third one in the list is invention of destructive weapons and the sustenance of business around it. Researches reveal that bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had done more damage to the world than all the wars fought from the time of emergence of human beings on the planet. When I read a news item recently that from our Thanjavur air force* unit, we have the air strike power to send missiles to 3,000 miles away targets with precision, two old proverbs which my father used to say — don’t have association with iron, snake charmer dies of snake bite – came to my mind.

Though it is necessary to build weapon power to ensure our safety, at the core, is it not man’s blunder to have invented destructive weapons and are we not snake charmers in a sense? The things/foods we associate with have the capacity to pass on their quality in terms of behaviour (guna:), etc, says a Sanskrit verse.

The last Himalayan blunder in the list is the invention of god. There is no doubt man was fearful in those dark ages where after the sunset everything became of the same colour. And this must have prompted man to seek a psychological crutch. But is it not a sad fact that he was not able to drop the belief after the invention of fire? He could have simply started saying that he didn’t know whether there exists god or not and lived a life of inward and outward inquiry instead of asserting the beliefs through thought webs that is sans logic and test module. By taking an assertive belief path man had not only fought religious wars but also developed rituals to assemble at a chosen place in thousands and thereby created a cause for deaths due to stampedes, sacrifices, etc.

* Thanjavur Air Force Station of the Indian Air Force is located in Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, India. It is home to a squadron of the IAF's Sukhoi Su-30 MKI supermanoeuverable fighter aircraft — the first IAF fighter squadron in Tamil Nadu.